UNITED STATES AUTHOR · UNITED STATES · HISTORY
John Prados
For a time Comrade Phong became the watchmaker of Dien Bien Phu.
— from The Blood Road, 1998
Most acclaimed
The hidden history of the Vietnam War
1990
In The Hidden History of the Vietnam War, Mr. Prados revisits the conflict by taking the reader behind conventional histories. Drawing from a broad range of sources and using new evidence, he focuses on key strategies, events, and personalities in the struggle. In narratives and vignettes that display his impressive command of facts and analysis, he sheds new light on the issues and punctures the popular mythologies of the war. The book explores the mysteries of the Tonkin Gulf, evaluates the quality of intelligence before Tet, profiles the influence of the Buddhists in the politics of South Vietnam, investigates the war of numbers over body counts, analyzes the failure of large-unit war, assesses the performance of air power - in short, Mr. Prados deals with virtually every major issue of the war, bringing to the discussion a fresh perspective. But he also breaks new ground in telling the story of the first American prisoners-of-war in Vietnam; reinterprets the role of Lyndon Johnson; furnishes the best account to date of communications intelligence in the war; describes the social characteristics of the South Vietnamese military in a way not seen before; and defines the religious and political conflicts that hindered the Vietnamese military effort. He provides the first detailed accounts of the 1972 crisis over the mining of Haiphong Harbor and of the Nixon administration's effort to destroy American veterans groups that opposed the war.
The Blood Road
1998
Could the United States have won the Vietnam War if it had been able to cut off the Viet Cong from their North Vietnamese support by severing the Ho Chi Minh Trail? Acclaimed historian John Prados tackles this crucial question in an unprecedented work of historical scholarship. Built as a vital gateway inside a divided nation, the Ho Chi Minh Trail embodied the dreams and aspirations of an entire people. As the North Vietnamese struggled to open and sustain The Trail, the American and South Vietnamese forces struggled to close it - a life-and-death contest that tells the intricate and dramatic story of the Vietnam War in microcosm. Aided by formerly secret government documents and previously unavailable oral histories, memoirs, and interviews, Prados explores all sides of the conflict, providing details of the action in Hanoi and North Vietnam and avoiding the narrowly focused battle histories, atomized individual accounts, and overly generalized vision that have dominated previous histories. Prados considers each of the multiple perspectives that shaped the conflict: the struggle of the Vietnamese soldiers in the jungles, the heroism of American troops, the highly influential antiwar protests of the period, the intricate machinations of the generals and diplomats, and the lingering impact on the people and governments of neighboring Laos and Cambodia.